Nissan Blames Agency for Tweet Knocking Tesla

Last week Elon Musk’s Tesla Motorspoached Nissan’s PR chief to lead its marketing and communications efforts. We can see why the larger company might respond by one-upping the upstart, but based on its response to a quippy tweet, we do not think this clip summarizes its strategy moving forward:

Maybe not. Nissan immediately deleted the image and blamed it on its social media agency. Pic after the jump.

The image included the text “It’s okay #NewJersey, you can still #GoElectric with the #NissanLEAF #EV”, but the brand’s senior social media comms specialist was not amused. He told Autoblog Green:

“[This] was not a tweet that was reviewed or approved by Nissan. We saw it and asked them to take it down. We thought it was a discussion we didn’t need to be weighing in on.”

The “them” in that quote is the brand’s unnamed agency—and as in the recent Home Depot “is it racist?” story, we have to wonder how someone designed, planned and scheduled this message and accompanying pic without approval from higher-ups.

And was it really so bad? We have to agree with blogger Domenick Yoney, who writes that it’s far more amusing than anything else coming from the Nissan Leaf Twitter feed.

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